It’s now simpler than ever for developers around the world to enroll in the Apple Developer Program. As of today, the Apple Developer app also supports enrollment in Canada, France, India, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, and Spain.

Developers can start and finish their membership purchase with local payment methods on iPhone or iPad. And since membership is provided as an auto-renewable subscription, keeping it active is easy.

View on the App Store

Make sure your apps are ready for iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5. With the upcoming public release, all apps must use the AppTrackingTransparency framework to request the user's permission to track them or to access their device's advertising identifier. Unless you receive permission from the user to enable tracking, the device's advertising identifier value will be all zeros and you may not track them.

When submitting your app for review, any other form of tracking — for example, by name or email address — must be declared in the product page's App Store Privacy Information section and be performed only if permission is granted through AppTrackingTransparency. You'll also need to include a purpose string in the system prompt to explain why you'd like to track the user, per App Store Review Guideline 5.1.2(i). These requirements apply to all apps starting with the public release of iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5.

As a reminder, collecting device and usage data with the intent of deriving a unique representation of a user, or fingerprinting, continues to be a violation of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement.

Learn more about user privacy and data use

If you support Family Sharing, you can now receive new App Store server notifications for real-time updates on family member statuses.

• REVOKE lets you know when to revoke a family member’s access to an auto-renewable subscription or non-consumable in-app purchase. The App Store sends this notification to your server when a purchaser disables Family Sharing for an in-app purchase, the purchaser or family member leaves the family group, or the purchaser asks for and receives a refund.

• DID_FAIL_TO_RENEW and DID_RECOVER are now sent for each family member when a shared subscription fails to renew due to a billing issue and when it is successfully recovered.

As a reminder, the following deprecated App Store server notification and top-level objects are no longer supported in production as of today. Update your code now to continue providing a seamless user experience.

• RENEWAL
• latest_receipt
• latest_receipt_info
• latest_expired_receipt
• latest_expired_receipt_info

Learn about App Store server notifications

Learn about supporting Family Sharing

The HTTP/2-based Apple Push Notification service (APNs) provider API lets you take advantage of great features, such as authentication with a JSON Web Token, improved error messaging, and per-notification feedback. If you still send push notifications with the legacy binary protocol, make sure to upgrade to the APNs provider API as soon as possible. APNs will no longer support the legacy binary protocol after March 31, 2021.

Learn about the APNs provider API

Additional details have been published on completing your App Store privacy labels, including more information about data types, such as email or text messages, and gameplay content. You’ll also find more information about data collected in web views and data that may be entered by users within documents or other file types.

Learn more

Indoor Mapping Data Format (IMDF) lets you present your users with fully-customized indoor maps of venues around the world, such as stadiums, airports, and campuses — all under the security and privacy controls of the property owner. Developed by Apple, IMDF makes it easy for organizations to enable Apple’s indoor positioning service on iPhone and iPad inside facilities without installing additional infrastructure, like beacons. It offers a mobile-friendly, compact, human-readable, and highly extensible data model for any indoor space, providing a basis for orientation, navigation, and discovery. And now, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) membership has added IMDF 1.0.0 to the OGC Standards Baseline as a Community Standard.

Learn more about IMDF

Learn about displaying indoor maps